The federal government is refusing to relax its pressure on bureaucrat staffing and wages, rejecting key reforms proposed by its own review of the public service.
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As it prepares to deliver its budget update on Monday the government is sticking by the Average Staffing Level cap, which it says is helping it deliver a surplus.
The Thodey review of the Australian Public Service, released on Friday, recommended that the cap be scrapped as part of the implementation of a bureaucracy-wide workforce strategy.
But in its response to the review, the government said the rule was "working effectively".
The cap was introduced in 2015 the keep the size of the public service at or below 2006 levels, and has been blamed for a sharp rise in government spending on external contractors and consultants, which has more than doubled since 2012-13.
The Community and Public Sector Union, which represents public servants, claims that almost 19,000 jobs have been cut from the APS since 2013.
National Secretary Melissa Donnelly said the shortfall was "causing enormous damage to the capacity of the Commonwealth to deliver policy and essential services that all Australians rely upon".
The government has also knocked back the review's proposal to streamline the public service's industrial arrangements by consolidating hundreds of different wage scales and work arrangements into a common set of pay and conditions.
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There are more than 100 enterprise agreements in force across the APS, covering around 150,000 staff, and include a thicket of pay points within job classifications.
The review said this complexity led to anomalies and would hamper changes to the structure and operation of the public service, such as the plan unveiled by Prime Minister Scott Morrison last week to cut the number of departments from 18 to 14.
But, keen to retain flexibility in its industrial arrangements, the government said the move to a common core of pay scales and conditions was unnecessary, and instead flagged greater scrutiny of senior executive service remuneration.
"Current policies around APS pay and conditions are working effectively," it said, noting the recent negotiation of a number of enterprise agreements in the public service.
Keeping the pressure on wages, it said the Secretaries Board, comprising all department secretaries and the APS Commissioner, would consider ways to "inject greater discipline in SES remuneration".
Just a week after APS bloodletting that saw the departure of five department secretaries, the government also showed no interest in Thodey recommendations to regulate the hiring and firing of department and agency heads, saying current arrangements worked.